Journalist Alan Cleaver reports on the impact of swine flu in the UK with a particular slant on how the media report the pandemic. The views expressed are his personal views only.

Saturday, 29 August 2009

Black Death: Hopefully nothing like swine flu

My interest in swine flu has rekindled my interest in other plagues, including the Black Death of the mid-14th Century. So rather timely as been the publication in paperback of Prof John Hatcher's "The Black Death - An Intimate Story of a Village in Crisis", published by Phoenix. Prof Hatcher gives the already saturated Black Death literary market a personal twist by providing a fictional narrative of what it must have been like to live in the village of Walsham during these years. But - fortunately - Prof Hatcher can't keep the academic in him down and we are showered with wonderful historical detail about those times. Frightening but totally absorbing.